


The Infiltration of Corporation

by cereal, gallifreyburning



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:52:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1243543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cereal/pseuds/cereal, https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and Rose go undercover in the city of Corporation, where mandatory bowling, organized mating, and mind control are all part of the business plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work done in "fic tennis" style, passed back and forth between authors in 500(...ish) word increments over on Tumblr. This round is honor of [crazyandsexy](http://crazyandsexy.tumblr.com)'s birthday, because we love her! The prompt picture for this round was provided by [noyouplum](http://noyouplum.tumblr.com/), and can be seen [here](http://noyouplum.tumblr.com/post/45554557518/ive-seen-things-i-never-wanted-to-see-ive-been)!

There is a very yellow mustard stain on the lapel of Rose’s very expensive business suit and it is very distracting. 

She’ll admit, not even under duress, just regular, ol’ ask-and-answer admitting, that it’s not very hard to distract her right now, stuck here in this meeting like she is, but she’d prefer it not be a condiment-based distraction.

Some spaceships out the boardroom window, the senior director of marketing spontaneously growing a third eye — or, wait, even better, his terrible coffee breath suddenly morphing into a tiny, sentient cloud and attacking the finance department, that’d be ideal. 

As it is, she’s stuck inkblot-analyzing the mustard stain (it looks like a puppy wearing a newsboy cap, from this angle) and feeling grateful that this isn’t her real life, at regular intervals.

Not that  _this_  was ever in the cards for Rose Tyler — a time-traveling alien or no, she was never going to grace marble hallways, her high heels clacking like a metronome as she made walk-and-talk decisions with coworkers who would roll up their windows driving through the Powell Estate. 

It  _is_ , however, thanks to that time-traveling alien that she’s here right now.

There’d been a landing, a perfectly normal landing, full of possibilities and excitement and being thrown on her arse hard enough that she made a note to stop keeping her mobile in her back pocket.

And then there’d been trouble. 

The city they’d landed in was called Corporation, on a planet that looked a lot like — but wasn’t — Earth. It was a city dependent on the mega-business in the towering skyscraper at the town’s center, and it was a city at the mercy of the corruption that flowed like blood through its halls. 

Rose had been installed, with a little psychic paper trickery, as a senior level executive — the Doctor had explained that he’d be seen as a threat, but these blokes, in all their disgusting misogyny, wouldn’t bat an eyelash at a woman. She’d be seen as a token hire, and left be. 

The Doctor, meanwhile, had nabbed himself a position in the graphic design department, mouth running about how quaint the computers were every time they had a moment alone. 

And there hadn’t been many.

They both lived in the company housing building next door to the offices, but Rose’s position afforded her a spacious flat on the second-from-the-top level. The Doctor was somewhere eight floors below, toiling with the other employees without words like “director” or “manager” or “grandmaster over-compensating general” in their titles. 

They’d been here three days, and she’d worked late each one of them, stuck in her office with the Doctor texting her pictures from a pub and a bowling alley and another pub as he built up his coworkers’ trust and began to mine them for information. 

She’s not sure if he’s even sleeping in the flat, or if he’d gone back to the TARDIS each night, but she’s determined to get out of work at a reasonable hour today and find out. 

If only this meeting would end. 

“Miss Tyler, since you’re the consulting expert, why don’t you weigh in? We could use a fresh perspective.”

Rose’s fingernail digs into her lapel, mustard flaking off the fabric and onto the polished mahogany conference table. Her mouth hangs open for a split-second longer than it should, and President Oouftangle squints at her.

That squint is rather intimidating – President Oouftangle has eight of them. Eyes, that is. This planet a diverse urban landscape, sort of like a real-life version of Coruscant, a capital that has drawn in species of all kinds for hundreds of years. Including a ruling oligarchy of planetary overlords who happen to be giant arachnids.

It’s remarkable, that tailors can make eight sleeves fit off of a single suit jacket, but they can’t make trousers to fit his hairy, spider-y abdomen. It’s hard to take anyone seriously when they aren’t wearing trousers.

“You came from Synergy to advise on this problem specifically, did you not, Miss Tyler?”

“Of course,” Rose replies. It’s part of their backstory, their transfer in from the neighboring city of Synergy (the capital of Buy-In Province), to consult on the current lull in productivity from this particular head office. Right now, Rose is staring at her own reflection in eight pitch-black, unblinking eyes, and all she can think about is a mustard-stain in the shape of a dog wearing a hat. “Caps!” she blurts out, tearing her gaze away to look up and down the length of the table at the various assembled alien creatures. “Thinking caps. That’s what we need. To put on our thinking caps!”

“A mind-control beret,” President Oouftangle says, his mandibles quivering in obvious delight. Rose wonders how the TARDIS managed to translate  _thinking cap_ from English into  _mind-control beret_ in giant spider _._ “What sort of programming would you recommend for these berets, to stem the rebellions taking place in the leverage factories?”

“The factories … where the workers aren’t building enough leverage?” Rose echoes.

“Leverage production has been down for months,” one of the vice-presidents says. Rose can’t remember his name, but he has purple skin and sticky fingers, like a frog. He waves his hand in agitation, and three stuck memos wave along like little white flags. “We’re losing the war! This is what we’ve been discussing for the last six hours, woman, it’s the whole purpose of this meeting!”

“Obviously productivity programming,” Rose says. She stands up, straightens her blouse, and marches to the gibberish-covered whiteboard with a confidence she doesn’t feel. Snagging a marker, she scribbles two words: “Productivity and focus. We can … add subroutines to eliminate time-wasting habits, like smoke breaks and water-cooler chats.” 

She circles a few words, draws some lines to connect them, like a diagram of a molecule.

“What about bio-eliminative subroutines? We ought phase out the workers’ need for lunch, lavatories, and familial interaction. It will save on time and facility costs!” another humanoid board member chimes in, bright and chipper.

“Ri-i-i-i-ight,” Rose says, just as President Oouftangle grunts in excitement. The wood table quivers.

“Brilliant, Tyler!” He swivels his ergonomic chair toward another board member. “Jestoffsen, send word to the hardware and software departments, I want a working beret prototype before tomorrow.” Another swivel. “Howard, you oversee the marketing effort. Every citizen of Corporation should be begging to own one by the end of the week. Stylish! Trendy! I need designers! Models! Runway shows!”

“I’ll be glad to personally handle that, Mr. President,” Rose interjects. “I’ll take word down to the Marketing department right now, as a matter of fact!”

“Fine. I’m relying on you, Tyler,” President Oouftangle roars, six of his eight legs waving in every direction. The ergonomic chair tips backward precipitously; Rose imagines Oouftangle on his back, spindly appendages flailing as he tries to right himself, but somehow the chair stays upright. “Everybody get moving! Make this happen!”

Howard shoots Rose a murderous glare, licking menacingly at his pointy dinosaur teeth while his little velociraptor claws ball into impotent fists. Rose gives Howard a tight smile and sails out of the boardroom, off toward the Marketing cube farm and the Doctor, two dozen floors below.

The lift ride down is interminable — she learned early on in her travels with the Doctor that smooth jazz never gets any different, or any better. 

Instead she focuses on the lift’s other occupants. There’s a gray-looking bloke, his skin like an elephant’s, which complements the trunk and floppy ears drooping from his head. He’s wearing a suit, the bottom of his tie is only just visible at the bottom of the trunk, and when he catches her looking, he sniffs loudly. 

She darts her eyes away to the opposite corner, where a squat, green-faced man is rolling back and forth on his…oh, on his  _shell_. He looks a little bit like a baddie from Super Mario and he, too, notices Rose’s gaze. He gives her a lop-sided smile and a shrug, thumbing a hand at his back. 

“Business shell,” he says, with a what-can-you-do sort of tone. “Always so itchy.”

The last person in the lift is a woman, a human-looking woman in tight black jeans and a white button-down (and loafers, oh god, what Rose wouldn’t do for a pair of loafers or trainers, or anything other than these bloody heels), and Rose wonders at that. Any time she leaves the top floors, heading down to the lower levels, the number of humanoid species increases almost exponentially. 

It’s only a hunch right now, but if she had to guess, she’d say the factories were probably teeming with humanoids, too. 

Before she can put together a theory to back up the hunch — the susceptibility of humans to suggestion, their bodies’ meager standard defenses — the lift dings for the Doctor’s floor. The other woman exits first, turning left, the same way Rose intends to go, and Rose hangs back a beat, trying to keep from awkwardly falling into place beside her and being unable to avoid stilted workplace smalltalk.

The farther through the offices they go though, the weirder it becomes, as Rose is still following the woman, right back to the far corner, where the graphic design department sits. The floor plan here is more open, fewer cubicle walls and more room to see your coworkers, to bounce ideas off of them, whatever else the creative types need, Rose assumes. 

The woman takes a seat at one of the workstations, the one right next to the Doctor, Rose is…dismayed to find, but she doesn’t seem to spare a glance for the Doctor, or if she does, it’s subtle. The Doctor notices her though, turning to greet the woman before catching sight of Rose shifting on her feet at the entrance to the department. 

“Rose Tyler, what brings you to these lowly lower levels?” he says, lingering on the Ls, drawing them out. 

Everyone else in the area turns to look at her, and Rose takes note of the amount of humanoid species again. One bloke has a horn like a unicorn, and one woman is possibly — although Rose refuses to look directly at it to confirm — sporting a third breast, ‘Total Recall’-style — but everyone else looks unmistakably and unremarkably human. 

Rose is sure the Doctor is disappointed.

“Only coffee left up on 26 is too posh for my blood,” she says with a smile. “Thought I’d grab some of the swill they chuck at you lot.”

She keeps her tone light, joking, but the unicorn bloke, and a woman in a purple jumper both shoot her a look — unease, maybe, distrust, annoyance, Rose can’t tell, but she doesn’t like it. 

It occurs to her that, back home, she’d be giving the same look to any woman in a business suit caught strolling around the Powell Estate, trying to make friends with the locals. 

Before she can try and recover — and how would she even do that? — the Doctor’s spinning in his desk chair, bouncing out of it and toward Rose. 

“Well, come on, then,” he says, “I’ll show you where they keep the sludge.”

The break room is different than any other break room Rose has ever seen. Well, to be fair the only other break room she ever spent any time in was at Henrik’s, and that was down in the basement close to Wilson’s security station (rest his soul). It was a dank room with laminate floors, steam pipes in the ceiling, and one sporadically-functioning microwave.

This room is like something out of a 1960’s catalog of the future. Avocado-colored appliances with oval-shaped windows line one entire wall. It looks like an automat of some kind, but Rose isn’t sure. There’s a  bank of booths off to one side, and a multi-tentacled gastropod manning a soda fountain. He’s pulling three sodas simultaneously, a paper soda jerk hat set at a jaunty angle on his bulbous head.

“The break room upstairs is all chrome and black glass,” Rose says, peering at the food inside one of the oval windows. She reaches for the door handle, but the Doctor catches her wrist before she can open it, gently pulling her away.

“Best not,” he says, settling her at a booth. He’s gone and back in a flash, after a quick conversation consisting of a few  _glug-glug_  sounds with the gastropod, he’s sitting in the booth beside her with two cups of black coffee.

“Where’s the cream?” Rose asks with a frown. The Doctor knows exactly how she takes her coffee, her tea, her chips, her steak, her Bufelli bubble-fizz, and pretty much everything else. It’s not like him to come back without at least one creamer packet. Usually he’s got a pocket-full.

“Best not,” he repeats in a low mutter, shooting a significant look at the corner of the room. Rose follows his gaze and finds a security camera perched near the ceiling.

The Doctor slumps down in the booth, ooching closer to her, until his hip and thigh are pressed against hers. He holds his paper cup in front of his lips, as though he’s blowing on it to cool it off. His head tips toward hers, until their temples are almost touching.

“Additives in the food and condiments,” he says from the side of his mouth. “Specially formulated stimulants just for the humanoids, so the work force never goes home and never sleeps.”

“But you’re out all the time, bowling and necking lager at the pub,” Rose whispers back, confused. “I have the pictures to prove it on my phone.”

“We go out, we have a pre-determined amount of leisure – or family time, depending on the individual – we come back, we work. It’s a six-hour cycle. The stimulants are engineered so that workers don’t even think about sleep, or wonder when they last saw their bed.” He stares at her out of the corner of his eyes, eyebrow nearest to her arching. She knows, she can feel the wrinkles form on his forehead as he lifts it. “Have you seen a bed in your flat?”

That gives Rose pause. She scours her memory, thinking specifically of the room where she rests, and realizes there isn’t one.

“I don’t suppose I have.”

“Mmph.” The Doctor takes a sip of coffee. “They don’t drug the coffee, it’s the only safe thing to ingest in the whole building. It’s all I’ve had to eat or drink for the last three days.” He sounds proud.

That would definitely explain why he’s jiggling both his legs with enough force to make the silverware on the table jingle softly. Rose realizes his movement is making her skirt ride up, slowly but surely, right where her thigh rests against the Doctor’s.

“Tell me the news from upstairs,” he says, oblivious to her skirt, pretending to blow on the coffee again.

"Thinking caps, mind-control berets; tomato, tom-ah-to." 

*****

The phrase “mind-control berets” gives the Doctor pause. Mind-control  _anything_  would, in fact, berets, mittens, those little string ties cowboys wear, but he’s been through the current product line backward and forward, plus the recently submitted requests, and nothing matches that description — yet. 

Which means it’s only in the pipeline, and that it can wait for a bit. 

“Anything else?” he asks, keeping his tone low as he deposits the coffee mug on the tabletop and turns it a few times. “Anything more…sinister?”

Rose matches his tone, but he can hear the smile in her voice. “More sinister than  _mind-control_?”

“Well,” he scratches at the back of his neck, “any indication what they plan to  _do_  with the mind-control?”

Rose shrugs, the movement jostling his arms, brushing the shoulder of her suit jacket against his own. 

“Increase productivity…or leverage…or — I don’t know, Doctor. To be honest, I feel a little out of my depth up there,” she says. “I’d probably be better off doing something like that.” She nods at the soda jerk busily — and efficiently — wiping down counters. 

“Nonsense, you’re brilliant,” he sniffs. 

“Yeah, well, I don’t feel like it. You know they spent 20 minutes talking about where to capitalize on ‘low-hanging fruit’ and it took me more than half that time to realize they weren’t talking about actual fruit?”

Her voice has begun to raise, back to normal conversation levels, and he widens his eyes to warn her off. Any hint that either of them don’t belong here, aren’t falling exactly into the order of things, and there’ll be trouble much sooner than expected.

“Have they talked at all about personnel matters?”

“Doctor, that’s almost all they talk about.”

“How about  _inter_ -personnel matters, then?”

Rose’s nail scratches at the handle of her mug, her teeth chewing on her lip as she tries to follow him. “How do you mean?”

“Co-workers mingling, parties, fundraisers, anything like that?”

She squints like she’s trying to remember. “There’s a banquet on Saturday, I get the feeling I’m supposed to attend. I think you are, too, though? They said everyone would be there.”

The Doctor nods, processing, and they each take a few sips of their coffees in silence.

“You know what’s weird though?” Rose says. “They said it was employees-only. How are you supposed to bring your spouse or whoever, if they don’t work here?”

Ah, there it is. 

“It wouldn’t be a problem,” he says. “Everyone’s spouses  _do_  work here. They certainly aren’t going to control every aspect of your schedule and then just let you go and fall in love all on your own. Unpredictable thing, love.”

Rose hums in affirmation, the vibration rippling through her and into him before she speaks again.

“So what, they just — don’t let people date?”

“No, no, dating is fine,” the Doctor says. “They,” he rolls his eyes upward, a reference to the floors above them, “just want to do the match-making. Tell me, Rose Tyler, has anyone been bending your ear about their handsome cousin you just  _have_  to meet?”

Rose’s eyes widen and she turns to him in a movement that draws the attention of the few other employees in the break room. She settles quickly, pretending to crack her neck. 

“Now that you mention it,” she murmurs. “I keep hearing about this bloke — Wood something…Denver Wood, that’s his name. And everyone just keeps bringing him up and keeps bringing him up. And it’s weird stuff, yeah? How he’s got such broad shoulders, such nice hair.”

The Doctor can’t keep in a snort. Sure this bloke’s got nice hair,  _sure_  he does. And what sort of name is Denver Wood anyway? That’s — that’s — that’s a building material. That’s lumber, is what that is. 

“Anyway,” Rose continues, “I thought it was weird. But now it makes sense, I guess.” She goes back to chewing on her lip before glancing at him once more.

“What about you?” she asks. “They in your ear about anybody?”

“Ah, yes, I keep hearing about Emmaline and her…triple assets.”

He can tell the moment Rose catches his meaning by the hitch in her breath.

“Really?”

He grins. “Nah, she’d be too much of a  _handful_ ,” he says, nudging Rose with his elbow as she groans and rolls her eyes.

Scooting out of the booth, he tugs Rose’s hand, dropping it immediately when he realizes the soda jerk has abandoned his post and is now openly watching them. “Come on, we better get back out there. You suits might get long lunches and endless coffee breaks, but we grunts have to watch the clock.”

Together they leave the break room and he waits until Rose is in the lift and the doors have closed before heading back to his department. 

When the Doctor sits down at his desk, there’s a light blinking on his office phone. It’s never done that before.

He picks up the receiver and stabs at a number keys with his index finger, a woman’s voice droning on in his ears with instructions that are too boring to pay attention to. After a few seconds of button pushing on his part and indignant beeping on the phone’s part, Rose’s voice pipes in through the handset.

“Doctor, you really ought to record a new voicemail message. It’s still got the one from the lady who had this extension before you. I forgot to mention before I left: your next project is to design the mind-control beret.” The Doctor perks up at that. “Not the technical bits, just the decorative … beret bits.” He perks right down again.

Design a hat? Time Lords don’t design hats. Pompously ornate collars with affixed formal headgear, yes. Smart and understated chapeaus that appeal to people with sensible fashion tastes, no.

Surely the Brigadier lost one of his UNIT berets on the TARDIS at some point, it’s bound to have ended up in the Wardrobe Room.

The Doctor needs to stop by the TARDIS anyway, he’s been meaning to send Rose an intra-office package with proper un-medicated food. The stimulants aren’t harmful, but he isn’t sure what else the President might decide to slip in alongside them at any moment. Especially if he’s already planning to implement mind-control on a massive scale.

“Bad news?”

The voice makes him jump; he does a double-take at the phone receiver before realizing that the woman talking to him is perched on the corner of his desk, not communicating through the tinny speaker.

Emmaline smiles at him, her long legs gracefully crossed at the knee, her hands full of memos, and her nice round bum smashing his officially issued Corporation-branded stress ball. At this height, her chest just happens to be at his eye-level.

Purely on accident.

Probably.

He’s up out of the office chair like a shot, trying to figure out where to put his hands. They end up on the back of his own hips, elbows akimbo. “P-pardon?”

“You look like you just got bad news,” she says with a glance at the phone, extending the memos toward him. “Call from upstairs?”

“Yes!” The Doctor takes the papers, sidling out past her, into the aisle. “Good news, big important project, lots to do.”

“Need any help?” Emmaline calls after him as he hustles out of the Graphic Design office.

“I’ll let you know!”

The TARDIS is hidden in a broken service lift shaft in the basement of the building. It’s a long ride down, and two separate flights of stairs, to reach it.

 _Denver Wood_ , he thinks with a frown as he shoves the key into the TARDIS door and steps inside.  _Definitely a villainous sort of name._

It’s quick work to pick up a healthy supply of food, but the beret is a different matter. He pokes around in the Wardrobe Room for almost an hour, only stopping a few dozen times to examine himself (and his hair, which is  _perfectly_  nice and  _quite_  thick and is  _definitely_ benefiting from his new back-combing trick), before he locates one of the Brig’s old UNIT berets.

That’s that, then. Beret – designed.

Time to find a big envelope to mail these biscuits to Rose, then put in an appearance at the department bowling league competition (he is the linchpin keeping the Graphic Design team at the top of the leader board, after all), and then to do a bit of digging on this  _Denver_ character.

*****

Rose is finally done for the day and the sun is just barely clinging to the sky. Still, it’s far better than usual these past few days, making the short walk back to the office housing next door in complete darkness.

She’s got her hand on the doorknob of her office — and how about that, her, Rose Tyler with her very own  _office_  — when the door swings open from the other side. 

Howard is standing there, a tooth-baring smile on his face that looks both forced, and like a grimace. 

“Oh, good, you’re ready then,” he says, taking in the briefcase clutched in her free hand. Strictly speaking there’s not much  _in_  the briefcase, but she is sort of getting a kick out of carrying it. And besides, everyone else carries one, it would look suspicious if she didn’t. “But, wait, why aren’t you dressed?”

He gestures to his outfit, the throwback bowling shirt with three vertical panels he’s wearing and the dad jeans (as her mum would call them, before ruling a bloke undateable) on his lower half. 

“I…what?” 

Howard nearly rolls his eyes, she watches the movement happen and the way he stifles it. Someone must have told him to play nice then.

“It’s bowling night? Once a week, the executive team plays, too? Honestly, Rose, did you pay attention at all in your on-boarding class?”

She hadn’t, in fact. She’d spent most of those eight hours that first day playing games in her notebook with the Doctor. It was a good distraction, but it was also part of their cover story — came up in the same training group, that’s how they know each other. Certainly they didn’t know each other before, certainly she didn’t travel with him in a blue police box. 

Howard growls under his breath, stalking into her office, and Rose is reminded of the raptors in Jurassic Park, the graceful, threatening way they moved, the speed of them.

He yanks open the top drawer of her filing cabinet and reaches inside, pulling out a bowling shirt to match his own and thrusting it at her.

“If you hurry,” he says, eyes skittering down to her skirt, her high heels, “you can probably put some jeans on next door. Bowling alley’s just across the street, but then, you knew that didn’t you? It was clearly outlined in the Company Supported Recreation module.” He gives her a look that says he knows he she didn’t, and then he’s back out of the office.

Rose moves quickly, nearly running to her flat to throw on jeans and trainers, tugging off her suit jacket and button-down to pull on the bowling shirt, and she’s in the alley just in time to see the executive team trooping toward an alley, including President Oouftangle, who’s wearing bowling shoes on each of his eight legs.

She jogs to the shoe rental counter, grabbing her size, before joining the team at their assigned lane.

On the opposite side of the scoring machine in their lane, lacing up her right shoe, is Emmaline.

Before she can process that, the Doctor is there, handing Emmaline another shoe, the left one, presumably.

“Here you go,” he tells Emmaline. “Didn’t seem to be knotted at all, but I’m always happy to help.”

“Rose! You finally made it!”

She whirls around to find the purple-skinned sticky-fingered vice president standing behind her. He shoves two bowling balls toward her and she takes them on instinct, cradling them in each of her elbows. The suckers at the end of his fingertips make popping noises as he pulls them away.

“Take the extra to that bloke, over there, if you don’t mind.” He points to the chairs at the end of their lane – the Executive bowling lane, clearly marked, right next to the Upper Management lane, the Middle Management lane, the Lower-Middle Management lane, the Lower Management Lane, the Under-Lower Management lane. There’s also an Executive Assistant lane, and Assistant’s Assistant lane, and several others too far away for Rose to read the label. Surely they have a separate lane for company dog-walkers, somewhere down the line. “He was late getting here, too. It’s like you were made for each other.”

Eyes rolling as soon as frog-man turns his back, Rose scoots past the ball-return mechanism and through the crowd to the end of the Executive lane area.

Sitting by himself, finishing up the buttons on his bowling uniform, is James Dean.

Rose knows somewhere in her logical mind that this can’t  _possibly_  be the real James Dean. James Dean died in a car crash on earth in the mid-twentieth century, there’s no way this is that same James Dean.

But if this bowling competition suddenly morphed into a James Dean look-alike contest, this bloke would win. If the universe in its entirety morphed into a James Dean look-alike contest, this bloke would  _still_ win. James Dean himself didn’t even look this much like James Dean, sitting in an alien bowling alley, staring back at her with a smirk on his face.

 _Staring_.

Oops,  _right_.  

“This is for you, I think,” she says, leaning forward to shift the heavy bowling ball into his arms.

He reaches out, puts his fingers into the holes, and brings his other hand underneath to grasp the ball from the bottom. For a split second they’re practically joined arm-in-arm, as if he’s about to escort her somewhere.

“Don’t see many of our kind of humanoids in the Executive lane,” he says with a smile. Rose smiles back instinctively, big and friendly. He even  _sounds_  like James Dean. “Y’know, smooth skin, hair on top, only four appendages. It’s tough for us, climbing up the corporate ladder.”

“Tell me about it,” Rose replies, thinking about the hike she and the Doctor had out of the skyscraper basement when they first left the TARDIS.

“I’m Denver,” he says, offering his free hand for a shake. “Denver Wood.”

Ahh. Well they weren’t lying when they said he had nice hair.

“Rose Tyler,” she replies, clasping her palm to his. His skin is warm and soft and his handshake is perfect – just the right amount of pressure, confident, not overcompensating. Except he keeps hold of her fingers a few seconds too long, shifting his grip and suddenly bending down to touch the back of her hand with his lips. It’s a delicate gesture, one that doesn’t feel like it’s overstepping any bounds.

It feels like a princely gesture, come to think of it.

“It’s an honor, Miss Tyler,” Denver says. “Did you work your way out of the factories to get to the Executive lane, like me?”

“Same,” she replies as he lets go of her hand. “Except I was in the factories in another city.”

“Synergy?”

Rose blinks in surprise. “Did someone already tell you that?”

“Nah, your accent is a dead giveaway!” 

Rose can only stare at him, wondering whether that’s some intervention from the TARDIS, or if Synergy…ers — Synergians? — somehow actually sound like Londoners. 

Denver doesn’t seem to notice her hesitation, shifting his bowling ball to one hand and leading her back toward the lane with the other. 

There’s something confident in the way his hand rests on her back, like he knows she won’t rebuff the gesture, or _thinks_ he knows anyway. Rose only leaves it there because it’s too crowded to put much distance between them. 

Well, _mostly_ , she _mostly_ it leaves there because of the crowd. She possibly — a tiny, tiny bit — leaves it there because it feels nice. But a tiny bit, really. Infinitesimal. (Just… _James Dean_. Her mum would flip.)

“What do you think of our competition?” he asks nodding ahead toward the lane, as they navigate through a pack of gelatinous blue employees.

“Our competition? I thought every…um, department had their own lane?”

“Oh, they do, but when we come around each week, our level, I mean, then we do match-ups. It’s sort of like a league, I guess. Only the rest of them get a practice in bowling earlier in the week, while our team stays locked in our offices.”

He gives Rose a commiserating smile.

“I think it’s only out of fear that we ever manage to win a game at all,” Denver says.

Rose stops short, her stomach flipping. 

“ _Fear_?”

“Yeah, like, you know, don’t want to make the boss angry, in case he’s got a bit of an ego about sports or something,” Denver shrugs. “Or _she’s_ got a bit of an ego,” he adds, and then looks just the slightest bit proud of himself for remembering gender equality. 

“Oh,  _oh_ , ego, right,” Rose says, the adrenaline burning off in her veins. 

“Anyway, the graphic design department’s not like that,” Denver says. “We haven’t won a game against them yet. It drives Howard absolutely _crazy_ , I love it.”

Rose grins, mouth opening to tell Denver all about how crazy she herself is apparently driving Howard when she catches it.

“Did you say the graphic design department?” 

Denver nods and then drops his voice. “And did you hear? There’s an _organic_ pair HR is considering allowing in that department. An _organic_ pair! That almost never happens! And we’ll get to see it tonight.”

The way he says it, it’s like some bloody great treat, and not — as Rose suspects — something to do with the Doctor and Emmaline. 

Still, it does seem like an _organic_ way to mention what she wants Denver to know.

“Hey, listen, about the pairs — I get the feeling they want us going that way, you and me, I mean, and you have to know, that’s not, I’m not, you seem like a great bloke, yeah? But it’s not gonna happen.”

Denver looks at her, his eyebrows drawing down as he considers her, it’s not an unkind look, just surprised. The look clears, and then his voice when he speaks sounds a little sad.

“Oh. Oh, no. Rose, that…that isn’t an option.”

Rose feels her cheeks heat, embarrassment flooding her system as she rushes to recover.

“I’m sorry,” she stammers. “I _completely_ misread things then, I thought they were looking for you and me to…you know.”

Denver nods, confusion stealing over his face again. “They are,” he confirms. “It — how did you put it? — it ‘not happening’ isn’t an option. It’s mandatory.”

Before she can respond, Howard’s next to her, gesturing to the lane and radiating irritation. “Ladies first,” he says. “Let’s bowl.”


	2. Chapter 2

*****

The entire competition is a disaster.

First of all, Rose is playing on the Executive team. The Doctor knew they would be participating in this final match, but Rose hadn’t been on the roster that went out in the memo earlier today. Rose is  _good_  at bowling. Her form, her score, she’s killing it, which is bad news during a competition in a scratch league like this one.

Second of all, Rose’s biggest cheerleader is a human bloke the Doctor’s never seen before. A human bloke named Denver – yep,  _that_ Denver, whose hair is not so spectacular and shoulders really aren’t broad at all. Denver, who only has eyes for Rose, is always there just at the right time to give her a high-five or to fetch her ball from the ball return. Denver, whose score is perfect, and who somehow manages to make the bowling shirt and shoes look stylish.

Taken altogether, the Doctor decides that Denver is definitely …  _not natural_.

Third of all, Emmaline kicks into high-gear – not when it comes to bowling, but when it comes to inappropriate physical contact. After the Doctor manages a strike, she throws her arms around him and plants kisses all over his cheeks, like he’s some sort of conquering hero. More than once, her hand finds his bum when he walks past her chair. Every time he yelps in surprise, and everyone in the vicinity turns to stare (or, in Rose’s case, turns to frown judgmentally) while Emmaline beams at him and puffs out her chest proudly, the buttons on her bowling shirt straining.

The graphic design team loses. Definitely an unmitigated disaster.

After the game, the Doctor’s attempts to talk to Rose are thwarted when she’s swept away by the rest of the team, jubilant as they victory march out of the bowling alley and to the pub next door.

“It’s all right, Doctor,” Emmaline says, coming to stand beside the Doctor and lacing her arms around his elbow. Her cheek rests on his shoulder. “Can’t win them all. We’ll do better next month.”

The rest of the Graphic Design team files past them, dejected, also on the way to the pub.

It’s part of the required life schedule on this planet, after all. Game, drink, back to the office. Game, drink, back to the office. Game, drink, back to the office. Everyone a mindless drone, waiting to be freed.

“Emmaline, let’s go drown our sorrows,” the Doctor says, marching determinedly after the Executive team, towing her along.

The crowd in the pub is raucous, toasting the Executives and their victory. It’s really quite interesting, on an academic level, the mechanics of a velociraptor and a spider tossing back pints together. Rose is seated on a barstool, Denver next to her, pushing a glass full of lager into her hands.

The rest of the Graphic Design team is huddles in a corner booth, and they’ve already got two extra drinks waiting for Emmaline and the Doctor.

They slide into their seats in a bizarre tangle of limbs, Emmaline seemingly unwilling to go for even a scant few seconds without touching him. 

The Doctor understands tactile urges like that, he and Rose have gotten themselves into trouble in plenty of places for their inability to stay out of contact, even on the most puritanical of planets, but that — unlike this — seems to be a mutual impulse. 

It’s something he’s working up to addressing, but her culture — if his guess on where she’s from is correct — would see nothing wrong with this sort of contact. And, to keep their cover in tact, he’s admittedly done nothing to dissuade her. Not encouraged, either, but still — she’s got no reason to believe her behavior is unwelcome. 

In fact, she probably thinks it’s expected, if the rumors about the possible approval of an organic pair in his department are true. He’s nearly certain it’s him and her and he’s just set himself to mentally untangling that mess when Chuck brings it up, his horn bucking forward as he nods his head at the Doctor to get his attention. 

“So, is it true?” Chuck asks, gesturing a hand between the Doctor and Emmaline. 

Emmaline laughs, it’s a pretty sound, she’s a pretty woman, but she really,  _really_  doesn’t hold the Doctor’s interest in that way and he fights to turn his grimace into a smile.

“Well, no one’s mentioned anything to  _me_ ,” Emmaline says, hand weaving under the Doctor’s arm to curl around his elbow. “But I’ve heard the same things you guys have. I do  _hope_  it’s true though, right, Doctor?”

She tips her face to his, eyelashes fluttering as though she’s besotted with him.

“Ehm, yeah,” the Doctor says, scratching at the back of his neck with his free hand. “Not sure…why though, why they’d approve it. Aren’t organic matches really rare?”

There’s a chorus of agreement from the table and then Chuck speaks again.

“Well, yeah, they’re rare, but so are you,” he says, gesturing at the Doctor. “Of course they’d want to put you with someone that pops ‘em out three at time.”

Emmaline giggles again, straightening her shoulders in a way that shows off her breasts, the ones that will presumably sustain their three-at-a-time offspring. 

He’s really stuck his foot in it. 

“Anyway,” Chuck says. “I’d think there’d have been an another organic on the executive team, if they’d just given it time. Did you see that new woman, Rose, with Denver? People that look like that flock together naturally, they’d have been squeezing out the next generation of human executives even if HR hadn’t set it up.”

Whatever trouble the Doctor thought he had before, it pales in comparison to what he’s got now, and his stomach drops to his knees as he turns to look at Rose.

She’s still at the bar, still with Denver. There’s a nearly-empty pint of lager clutched in one hand, and her other hand — oh, god, her other hand is wrapped around the back of Denver’s neck, scratching at the hair there as she smiles wide and tongue-touched and flirty. 

The Doctor’s up out of the booth before he can stop himself, long strides that take him to Rose’s side in an instant. 

She turns to look at him and whatever he was expecting — whatever glimmer of  _go along with this, I have a plan_  or guilt at being caught flirting or anything,  _anything_  to show this wasn’t what it seemed is entirely absent. 

This isn’t a ruse. This is really happening. 

It’s painfully obvious, now – drugged food, mind control, even if Rose has only been eating the biscuits the Doctor sent her the other day and nothing else, she’s gone and drunk nearly a pint of lager and whatever else it’s been laced with, too.

The biochemical engineering technology on this planet is remarkable. Like all remarkable technology, someone somewhere will inevitably put it to horrific use. The Doctor’s reconnaissance hasn’t revealed direct evidence of love potions so far, but he’s certain they exist.

“Doctor!” Rose says brightly, and Denver swivels his head to look at him. She seems alert enough, speech and gestures at normal parameters; just slightly tipsy, and unusually besotted. “Denver, this is the Doctor. He’s my best friend! Doctor, this is Denver. He’s my – well, I don’t know exactly. What are you, Denver?”

“Your plus one?” Denver replies, adoration-filled gaze locking back onto Rose.

Deep inside the Doctor, a sun goes supernova. Fire and heat, all-consuming and unstoppable, burns away everything he never knew he needed, leaving him parched and desolate. The end of the world, right here and now. No one else in the pub even notices.

Denver is still prattling on, words barely registering in the Doctor’s ears: “I’m her plus one, because Rose agreed to accompany me to the Company banquet tomorrow evening!” He holds a hand out for the Doctor to shake. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

The Doctor reaches out, but instead of taking Denver’s hand he stretches past it for Rose’s pint. Swirling the amber liquid at the bottom of the glass, he holds it up for a deep sniff. Then he tips it toward the ceiling and finishes it off in one long gulp. The chemicals in the beer prickle across his taste buds – filtered water, micro-farmed Polluxian yeast, slightly stale hops, barley malt, an undertone of Pluto-grown grapefruit, and an oak-infused neurochemical stimulator the Doctor hasn’t ever run into before.

His next instinct is to grasp Rose by the head, examine her pupil dilation and heart rate for a start – she needs a full physical, among other things – but that would probably attract even more strange stares than he already has, standing here having just spurned Denver’s handshake and chugged Rose’s beer.

“Thirsty!” the Doctor blurts out, before Denver’s shock can escalate into something more belligerent. “I’m really … really thirsty. Hard to drown your sorrows over a lost bowling match when the lager’s all gone.”

“Oh, well, you did put on a respectable show out there. Had us worried right until the end!” Denver replies, with bemused graciousness.

“I still can’t believe Howard was our top scorer,” Rose says, leaning forward to be heard over the din around them. “Who knew his little dinosaur appendages could toss a bowling ball with that kind of accuracy? Not me!” She pulls her elbow into her side and waves her forearm around, hand making claw-like motions. Denver laughs, and Rose dissolves into tipsy giggles, leaning against his shoulder.  

“I have some sketches for the beret project, Rose,” the Doctor says, trying to sound casual and still coming across as an angry drill sergeant. “I need to get your feedback, before we can move on to the next stage of the project.”

“Beret … project?” Rose repeats, her forehead creasing and her eyebrows pulling together in adorable confusion. “Oh, right! Thinking caps! I almost forgot.”

A sharp prickle starts up between the Doctor’s shoulder blades. He shrugs in a sharp motion. “Final review in front of the Board is tomorrow, your input is essential right now. Just a few minutes, and you’ll be right back up on the Executive floors with Denver before you know it.”

Denver looks like he wants to protest on Rose’s behalf and the Doctor rushes to cut him off. 

"Just ten minutes, really. Fifteen, twenty, half an hour at the most," he says, but Denver still looks wary and the Doctor’s eyes skitter around the bar as he gropes for something plausibly reassuring. 

His gaze lands on Emmaline, the way she’s staring at him with doe eyes. 

"I don’t want to be gone too long either," the Doctor says as he turns back to Denver and Rose. "Got my own conversation to continue." He gestures meaningfully toward Emmaline and Denver’s face immediately clears. 

"Ah, yeah," Denver says with a wink. "Heard you two might get organic approval."

Rose’s brow furrows, only for a millisecond, but it’s  _something_ , and the Doctor clings to it, ushering Rose off her stool with a hasty farewell to Denver. 

He shoulders their way across the pub and out into the street, the night air a welcome shock to the way his body’s gone heated with worry and…something else. 

Rose drifts along next to him as they cross the street, heading for the office. 

When they reach the lift he reaches to stab the button for the basement, intending to take her to the TARDIS, but before he can get at it, Rose’s hand shoots out, pressing the button for the marketing level. 

"The sketches…?" Rose says, and though he wants to protest, he goes along with it. Traffic to the basement at this time of night is bound to raise suspicion in security anyway. 

He’s certain — well,  _nearly_  certain, but it’ll have to do — that the CCTV is video only, not audio. He just needs to make it  _look_  like they’re doing work, and he should be able to speak to her normally. 

When the lift arrives at the marketing floor, all the lights are still on, a few dazed-looking workers still plugging away at their desks, as if their doses have been cocked up. 

He tugs Rose by the hand back to graphic design, where it’s mercifully empty, and makes a show of pulling drawings from his workspace, shaking the mouse of his computer to wake it back up. 

"Here," he says, guiding Rose to his desk chair, "you just sit here."

With a few clicks, he’s got a scan of the beret on the screen and Rose stares at it, looking a million miles away. 

He draws his sonic from his trousers, bloody bowling shirt having taken the place of his suit jacket and button down, and begins a quick, surreptitious scan of Rose as he leans down, pretending to walk her through the beret model. 

Her system is all over the place, pheromones and hormones and adrenaline, she’s like a live wire, sparking at everything. 

…or is she?

Is it just Denver, somehow? Or is she open to anything —  _anyone_  — and Denver just happens to be stepping up? 

With a mental apology to Rose, and a mental wince for Jackie Tyler, he stoops close over Rose and caresses a hand down her arm, fingers lingering on the delicate bones in her wrist before gliding down to take her hand and guide it to the mouse. 

He leaves his hand there, cupped over hers where it rests on the mouse, and though he’s touched her hand a thousand times, this way somehow feels more intimate, more deliberate. 

With his free hand, he thumbs at the sonic, taking another set of readings.

There isn’t a change in pheromones or hormones. A funny, bitter taste gathers at the base of the Doctor’s tongue. While everything else holds steady, Rose’s adrenaline readings begin to plummet.

“These military patches are all wrong, Doctor,” Rose says, using the mouse to wiggle the pointer over the beret’s UNIT insignias on the screen. The Doctor’s hand still rests against hers, and she gives it a deliberate tug. He drops into a crouch, so his face is level with hers. One arm along the back of the office chair, leaning in close, he’s practically hugging her. Her voice lowers to a whisper. “I don’t think ‘military chic’ was the look the Corporation Board was after. I know we’re not going to let them actually distribute this thing, but we have to put on a convincing show right up until the end.”

“A convincing show,” the Doctor repeats excitedly, just barely remembering to keep his voice low as well. He glances up at the security camera behind her head. “Putting on an act. That’s it, that’s it exactly! You got the packet of food I sent, didn’t you?”

“Five tins of banana biscuits.” Rose’s nose wrinkles. “I’ve had banana breath for days.”

“Really?” The Doctor takes a slow, deep breath, tipping his head even closer to hers. “Your breath smells fine to me.”

“And I’m so tired. I’ve been napping on my couch at my flat during leisure hour, since there isn’t a bedroom.”

“Well, that’s no surprise. Once you detoxed from those stimulants, your body went back to craving its normal amount of sleep. Humans need a ridiculous amount of sleep. Me, I can stay awake for weeks at a time with hardly a cat-nap. You lot waste hours every day, unconscious.”

“I was feeling better at the pub. I liked being at the pub.”

“It’s that lager Denver gave you, chock full of who knows what kind of mind-altering chemicals. I told you, nothing is safe except for the coffee.”

“A girl can’t live on biscuits and coffee alone, Doctor,” Rose says gravely. She blinks slowly, eyes practically crossed as she tries to look at him, so close to her own face. “Sometimes a girl has cravings for other things.”

“Are you still intoxicated, Rose Tyler?”

“Things like a hand to hold.” Her fingers wiggle, pinch together to squeeze his. “A true partner. And a feeling of warmth and security and … and …” she blinks again, leaning in closer. The Doctor is painfully aware of the security camera just behind her, so he nudges the frequency on his sonic to a slightly different setting. In another part of the building, a security screen fizzes and pops and dissolves into static.

“…And?” he prompts, bottom lip sticking out and sonic still buzzing in his hand, already forgotten.

Rose reaches up with her free hand, tracing the outline of his sideburn before sliding her fingers into his hair, fingernails tracing across his scalp.

The Doctor has no idea what Rose’s hormones and pheromones are doing right now, but his are rocketing right up to levels unbefitting for a time lord. Was his lager drugged, too? No, no, surely not, his act with Emmaline has been convincing. They’re letting things develop organically, no chemical intervention needed.

All of this is  _acting_. Playing a part. One show for the Corporation, to convince them he’s a happy cog in their machine, productive at work and settling down with Emmaline. Another show for Rose, right now, to make sure she’s her proper self, not some drug-addled Rose who runs off and falls for a pretty boy. The Doctor could mention Adam Mitchell, maybe, to remind Rose how it turned out last time she picked up a pretty boy.

Would that be rude, to mention Adam?

An incalculable number of thoughts race through the Doctor’s enormous brain, more than enough to drown out his increasingly shrill agitation at the realization that Rose Tyler is leaning in, right now,  _right, now_ , leaning in to kiss him. 

Her skin is warm – humans are so warm – it radiates off of her from less than an inch away. Her breath does smell a bit like banana biscuits and beer, but he decides it would definitely be rude to mention that before the kiss, he’ll save that for later. Rose’s eyes close and the Doctor’s eyes cross as he watches her close the gap between them.

Rose misses his mouth. Her head twists sideways, lips dragging across his cheek and jaw, and she comes to rest against his shoulder with a soft snore. 

The Doctor stares at the empty air where Rose’s face was a second ago, his lips puckered, his extremities tingling like mad, his stomach still fluttering like an ion anomaly in the Medusa Cascade.

"Oh," he says to no one in particular. 

*****

Rose comes to in her office, slumped over in her desk chair as the morning sun streams in from the windows. 

Her computer is on, a square, yellow Post-It stuck to the monitor, scribbled with the Doctor’s handwriting, “Remind me to have you watch this.” 

Her eyes refocus on the computer screen, a listing for the movie ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ filling the pixels and she smiles at the image it presents — he’s the one that brought her here, then. But from where?

She closes her eyes again, trying to concentrate on the events that would’ve led her here, and she finds it’s not the actions she has trouble remembering, it’s the reasons for them. She remembers with perfect clarity flirting with Denver in the pub, and then, oh god, nearly kissing the Doctor. 

While one of those things is something she thinks about — daydreams about — with a frustrating consistency, the other is…well, Denver’s not terrible on the eyes, but her heart belongs elsewhere and it’s been a while since she even had those thoughts about somebody else, let alone acted on them. 

It’s almost as if whatever was affecting her deliberately didn’t touch the memories, but stripped out the emotions behind them, leaving her to draw logical conclusions…leaving her with the illusion of free will. 

She wants to share that revelation with the Doctor — this, this…gaslighting by pharmaceutical — but before she can reach for her phone, her office door is banging open and Harold’s standing backlit in the doorway. 

“Oh, Rose, honestly, you should’ve adjusted by now,” Harold says, disgust dripping from his voice. “Change your clothes and be in the boardroom in 20 minutes. You and the Doctor have to present the beret project. You know, the one you  _stole_  from me?”

With that, he’s stalking back down the hallway, leaving Rose to rifle through her office’s cabinets for something to wear that isn’t a bowling shirt.

She finds a freshly dry-cleaned business suit hanging off the side of her filing cabinet and slips into it quickly, darting out of the office and down the hall to the loo to fix her hair and make up.

With only a minute to spare, she makes it to the boardroom, the eyes of the entire executive team — including Denver — and the Doctor staring at her as she crosses to the conference table.

She can feel the Doctor looking at her, but when she turns to meet his gaze, his eyes skitter away, landing on the speakerphone in the middle of the table and refusing to move. 

He has to know she was drugged, right? That she wouldn’t do that? No matter how much she might want things different between them, he has to know that she’ll respect his boundaries. 

Only…part of her memories, they show he wasn’t exactly putting a stop to things. He seemed almost  _willing_ , almost receptive. Was he drugged, too, then?

Oh, god, for every one of her memories with Denver, does he have a matching one with Emmaline? The thought makes her stomach flip over and she’s trying to quell the nausea when President Oouftangle requests she begin the presentation. 

Panicking, she immediately defers to the Doctor, insisting that he’s the real force behind the project, and appropriately preening when Oouftangle suggests the ability to give credit where credit is due is the mark of a good manager. 

She doesn’t miss the low, growling sound Howard makes in response. 

The Doctor is an inveterate showman, bouncing around the conference room. He’s got animated graphs and color-coordinated charts, supply and demand projections, technical specs and fashion sketches. The entire boardroom is enraptured, President Oouftangle regularly clapping his spider-legs in glee. The pièce de résistance is when the Doctor throws open the conference room door and Emmaline struts in, wearing a tight factory worker’s uniform and looking every inch like an alien Rosie the Riveter. She beams at everyone in the room, the beret perched atop her perfect ginger curls.

“We roll out during the banquet tonight,” the Doctor says. “I hope you don’t mind, Mr. President, but Miss Tyler went ahead and authorized production, so it’ll be in everyone’s hands — or rather, on their heads — by tomorrow morning.”

The Doctor looks over to Rose, as does everyone else. Denver beams at her encouragingly. The Doctor’s stare is inscrutable.

Rose wiggles nervously in her chair. She might not understand everything the Doctor’s doing right now, but she still trusts him, doesn’t she? “That’s right. The factory workers’ productivity will increase to 163.9% by tomorrow at noon. Leverage production will be out the roof.”

“Wonderful! Wonderful!” the President cackles, mandibles clicking and black eyes shining. “Miss Tyler, I think we’re going to have our first human Vice President walking these halls by the end of the week!”

“Thank you, sir,” Rose murmurs. The Doctor takes a bow to a smattering of applause, as though he’s just put on a magic show. Right after, Emmaline comes over to help him gather his presentation materials, standing so close to him they might as well be joined at the hip.

“You were remarkable.”

The voice, so close to Rose’s ear, makes her jump. She whirls around, chair wheels squeaking in protest, to find Denver standing right behind her. She would get to her feet so she isn’t gazing up at such a sharp angle, except he’s so close he’s practically pinning her in. She tries to scoot the chair back, but it bumps into the conference table.

“Thanks,” she says, hesitating only a second before standing up anyway.

Denver doesn’t back away, and they wind up chest-to-chest. He touches her elbow, like he’s about to go in for a hug or a snog or something worse, and she immediately twists sideways, out of his reach, putting space between them.

She doesn’t have to look across the room to know that the Doctor is watching.

“Big night tonight, you’re going to be the center of attention. And then there’s me, plus one, Rose Tyler’s arm candy.” Denver grins, leaning forward, and this time Rose holds her ground. She reaches to the side, snatches a ream of paper from the table and holds it in front of herself length-wise.  _There_. Exactly eleven inches between them. Denver is only mildly fazed. “I’ll pick you up at your flat around seven, okay?”

Rose finally gives in, glances at the other side of the room to motion to the Doctor for help, but he and Emmaline are already gone.

“How about I’ll pick you up, Denver,” Rose replies, pushing the papers into his chest more angrily than she should. This poor man is being drugged, after all. It’s not entirely his fault he’s being overly friendly, but that doesn’t mean Rose has to put up with it. “Six-thirty sharp.”

Denver’s grin, which had faltered, comes back. “It’s a date.”

“No it bloody well isn’t,” Rose mutters at his back, as he leaves the conference room. “It had better be a revolution, because it’s past time the Doctor and I got off of this planet.”

She spends the rest of the morning in her office, trying to keep her energy up, stripping off her suit jacket and going through the list of stretches Mickey had taught her the week she’d decided she was going to take up running. 

After a while, the stretches devolve into a caricature of yoga she’s seen on the telly, and eventually she’s just slumped on the carpeting of her office, trying to force herself to move. 

Around lunch time, she figures she could do with a bit more of the unlaced coffee, and heads down to the cafeteria, only to be greeted with the site of the Doctor and Emmaline, laughing like they haven’t a care in the world. 

When Emmaline snatches a crisp from the Doctor’s plate, Rose’s vision blurs around the edges, her heart galloping in a way that has nothing to do with the caffeine she’s come to get. 

It’s hard, it’s unbelievably hard, but she forces herself to take a breath, and direct her anger not at the Doctor, and not at Emmaline, but at the company behind all of this. 

These women, the Lyndas, and the Reinettes, and the Emmalines, they’re never the real villains, and Rose has thought about that more than once. How, if the first time she’d met the Doctor, he’d already had a female companion (or any companion, really), would she have changed her behavior? 

The answer is always no, she wouldn’t have changed a thing, she hadn’t done anything wrong, just as Emmaline isn’t doing anything wrong now. All over the galaxy, couples are pairing off, dancing through courtship and flirtation and the complicated business of finding someone to share their lives with, and it’s not up to the women to know if that spot’s already been filled. 

And, if the Doctor doesn’t speak up, maybe there’s a vacancy and Rose just doesn’t realize it. 

Now though, even he’s not liable — Rose remembers last night, remembers the talk of ‘putting on a show,’ and she has to assume that’s what this is. Even if she can tell that’s a genuine smile on the Doctor’s face, even if it’s too painful to watch. 

So she doesn’t. She collects her coffee and troops back to the lift, to the dwindling supply of banana biscuits in her desk, and she spends the afternoon running through possible scenarios for the banquet in her head.

*****

The Doctor had seen Rose in the cafeteria, seen the slump of her shoulders, the dark circles under her eyes, and he’d wanted to go to her.

But — and this is troubling — he’d wanted to stay, too. Emmaline was warm and soft pressed up against him, she was genuinely funny, and genuinely charming, and she might have made a good companion once, if he didn’t have Rose.

He does have Rose though, and that the part of him that’s usually so keen to place her above everything else was being muted in some way, indicates that it’s not just the food that’s being used to deliver the drugs, it’s something else. The air, or sound waves, or any number of possibilities. 

There’s no way to escape all contact on this planet, not without shutting himself up in the TARDIS, and he won’t do that without Rose, and so he forces himself to relax into things with Emmaline only enough to scratch the itch to do so. 

With that, the afternoon passes at a crawl, employees from all over the company stopping by his desk to congratulate him on the beret project, and to gawk at him and Emmaline, awe in their voices as they talk about organic pairs. 

By the time the end of the workday rolls around, he’s anxious for the banquet to start, to put all this behind him, behind them. 

It’s only then that he realizes he hasn’t even got a plan.  


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS: This final section contains violent and nsfw content. Happy birthday, Ania! :D :D :D

He’s got a plan for overthrowing the corrupt government, of course. He’s always had that plan – well, at least since two thirty yesterday. That plan has been carefully laid out, all the moving parts already set into motion.

He’s got a plan to solve the Emmaline problem. That plan involves stepping into the TARDIS (with or without a goodbye) and flying away.

He just doesn’t have a plan for whatever’s happening between Rose and Denver.

There’s the “grab Rose’s hand and pull her along into the TARDIS (with or without a goodbye)” option, which goes nicely with the Doctor’s pre-established Emmaline plan. But what if Rose isn’t too keen? What if she digs her heels in somehow? What if she asks Denver to come along when they leave?  _What if she asks to stay behind with Denver when the Doctor goes?_

He takes his time getting dressed and shows up to Emmaline’s flat in his pinstripes. It isn’t the company-issue formalwear, but it’s also definitely not contaminated with any mind-altering skin-penetrating chemicals. Emmaline sits close in the tube as they ride toward the banquet facility, which is located close to the planet’s biggest leverage factory – all the better to introduce the new beret to the masses. The tube car is moderately packed, and Emmaline is talking soft and low in his ear.

“I know people keep going on about our organic match, Doctor, and for a newcomer to Corporation you’ve handled the attention admirably. I’m just so glad you’re coming around on the idea. When I was a little girl, I used to dream about it — you know how children are, hoping for the impossible. Not being assigned a partner by the Board, being allowed to choose, just that one little thing. I never imagined something magical like that could happen to me. Never imagined I was special or different enough to deserve it. I’m so proud, Doctor. Proud to be your organic match.”

The earnestness in her voice, the radiant happiness of her countenance, makes the Doctor’s hearts seize. This right here – this woman, the small scope of her dreams, the fact that she cannot see how remarkable she is – this is why he’s on this planet. This is who he needs to save. There are lives at stake here, a planet enslaved, minds twisted and controlled.

The thing with Rose, he’ll worry about that later.

“Emmaline,” the Doctor says gravely, shifting toward her, taking her hand in his own. She smiles at him, her eyes lit up with something fierce and deep. It’s not love, though. It’s hope. Hope that her life will change, that things will be better for her. Hope that the Doctor will make it better.

And he will, of course.

But certainly not with any marriage, organic or not.

“You are remarkable. More brilliant than you ever give yourself credit for. You’re kind and clever, bold at all the right times – there are great things in store for you, Emmaline, I promise. Great and wonderful things. Those things just might not be exactly what you’re expecting.”

She’s blushing. What he’s saying, it’s true. Emmaline is clever. She’s next in line for management. She’s assertive in meetings at all the right times and in all the right ways, she’s kind without being a pushover, she shouts when it’s warranted. He’s known her a week now, and he’d trust her with his life.

The Doctor holds her gaze. “I mean it. You are so very, very special. And it has nothing to do with me, or with any sort of marriage at all. It’s because of  _you_ , and only you. All by yourself, you are worth more than a thousand organic matches and you deserve to always make your own choices.”

“Oh, Doctor.” Her expression is one of wonder, and maybe a little bit of fear. “We aren’t supposed to say those sorts of things.”

He snorts and rolls his eyes. “I have a feeling it’s the first in a long line of things I’m going to do tonight, that I’m really not supposed to.”

For a moment, Emmaline looks frightened, a lifetime of what is effectively brainwashing bucking against the notion of anything that doesn’t fit.   
  
With a mental sigh, he casts a deliberate look at her mouth, dropping his eyelids low, parting his lips, better for her to think that  _this_  is how he intends to rock the boat than anything like what he’s got planned.   
  
If she can just…stay calm, stay out of the way, he can stop people from getting hurt.   
  
Emmaline’s eyes widen as she catches his intended meaning and she blushes endearingly. His eighth self, in particular, would’ve liked her, he thinks.   
  
She tips her head to his shoulder, keeping their hands knotted in his lap, and they spend the rest of the ride in silence.   
  
The banquet hall, when they emerge from underground, is lit up like a beacon, spotlights dancing across the sky as a silent reminder to anyone who’s forgotten that they have somewhere they’re supposed to be tonight.   
  
Emmaline takes the arm he offers and together they walk through the doors, his gaze already scanning for Rose.   
  
"Are you looking for Rose?" Emmaline asks, taking in the way his eyes dart to every corner of the room.   
  
The Doctor shrugs. “Yeah, or that omelette bloke.”  
  
"What?"  
  
"Denver? Denver omelette?"  
  
Emmaline’s brow furrows in confusion.  
  
"Nevermind," the Doctor says. "Just know that somewhere galaxies away, a bloke named Mickey just felt pleased because he’s no longer got the most ridiculous nickname."  
  
Emmaline laughs. “I do hope you’ll tell me about all that someday. We knew, you know. All of us in the department, we knew you weren’t from Synergy. Not originally anyway.”  
  
He has the sudden, mad impulse to tell her everything, to unburden himself in advance of the evening, but he keeps his mouth closed, running his tongue along the backs of his teeth to stopper the words.   
  
Before they can move any farther, Chuck is in front of them, his horn gleaming like he’s polished it up special for the evening.   
  
He probably has, the Doctor realizes. This entire society looking forward to tonight, and he’s gonna do…well, what he always does.   
  
Chuck directs them to the department’s table before waving off — he’s gotten word that they’ve picked a match for him in finance, and he wants to see if he can catch a glimpse.   
  
The Doctor leads Emmaline to the table, reaching to pull out her chair before stopping mid-motion.   
  
There, two tables up, in a place of honor, is Rose. She’s in a dress, dark blue or black, he can’t tell in the hall’s lights, her arms are bare, her hair is pinned up and she looks — she looks stunning.   
  
She also looks like she’s got eyes only for Denver.   
  
"You were more than friends once, weren’t you?" Emmaline’s voice is soft and sad as she follows the Doctor’s gaze. "Or you wanted to be."  
  
The Doctor shakes his head, clearing the pinpricks gathering under his skin.   
  
"That doesn’t matter now," he says, and then clears his throat to lighten his tone. "Come on, let’s take our seats. How do they usually do this here? Awards first?"  
  
Emmaline nods.   
  
"Well, here," he says, stuffing a hand into his pocket. "You must be famished."  
  
He hands her one of the banana biscuits, illegal contraband in a society like this.   
  
With a searching look the Doctor refuses to squirm under, Emmaline gives another small nod, accepts the biscuit, and takes a bite. 

*****

Sitting next to Denver, trying to ignore his arm across the back of her chair, Rose scans the incoming banquet crowd, looking for the Doctor.

This dress is a bit tight, but the Doctor sent it in another one of those intra-office deliveries, carelessly wadded up inside a manila envelope. When she pulled it out, the wrinkles fell straight out of the fabric; there are definitely a few benefits to clothing from the future. She doesn’t know why the Doctor wanted her to wear this dress in particular, but he usually has a reason for these sorts of things, so she’s going along.

As usual.

Going along without a clue as to what the plan is, or how he intends to help these people, and get them both off the planet afterward. Going along and telling herself she won’t give him a good slap next time she sees him, just for the sake of avoiding a public scene.

Most times she doesn’t  _mind_  going along for the ride, but sometimes – nights like this – she just wishes he’d included a little memo in the package with her dress, just a few informative bullet points to put her mind at ease and help her concentration.  _1\. Look out for the purple crocodile at table fifteen; 2. Don’t eat the tapioca pudding; 3. My infatuation with Emmaline is just a ruse; 4. I won’t ditch you here with Denver; 4. While I’m thinking about it, I should definitely apologize for the last time I ditched you by charging off into France and leaving you behind on a dead spaceship._

“Rose, before the ceremony starts tonight, I have to ask you something.”

She glances at Denver, then goes back to scanning the crowd. If this is leading up to a marriage proposal, she’s going to throw her glass of pink champagne in his face. “Okay.”

“You worked your way up through the ranks, from the factories, like me. You remember what it’s like there, how terrible that life is.”

“Yeah,” she lies.

“Your family, your friends, they’re still there. Living like that, starving and struggling to survive.”

“Mmm hmm.” She’s stopped looking at the crowd, and turned her full attention to Denver. This conversation isn’t going the way she thought it would, and it’s suddenly gotten interesting.

His voice lowers, his handsome face turning even more grave as he leans in so only she can hear him. “What if you could change that for them? What if you could make a difference?”

“How? How could I do that?”

Denver’s hand is on her shoulder, and she’d think he was making a move, except for the fact that there’s no sign of drug-induced infatuation in his eyes at all right now.

“I never thought I’d find another person who would understand, who might help. Tonight’s the night, Rose. I’m going to make a difference tonight. I’m going to change everything. And I’d like you to help me. I don’t want to do this alone, I want you to stand next to me while we free our people from the slavery they’ve been living in for so many generations.”

“Oh my god,” Rose says, comprehension dawning. “You’re part of it, aren’t you? You’re part of the plan.”

“The plan?”

“What you said – change and freedom –  _the plan_.” It’s such a relief, knowing that the Doctor really is on top of the situation, he’s been conspiring with Denver all along. Everything – the canoodling with Emmaline, the prickling at Denver in public, it’s all been an act. “The Doctor brought you up to speed?”

“The Doctor?” The confusion in his expression is fleeting. “We did talk some last night, at the pub.”

“I’m in, Denver. Whatever the plan is, I’m right in the middle of it.”

His smile stretches from ear to ear. Reaching up to scratch his cheek, one of his nervous habits, he looks down and lets out a sigh. “You have no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that. I know this match between us might not be what you were expecting or what you wanted, but you have to admit we’ll make a good team.”

Rose lays a hand on his shoulder, palm pressed to his chest, and waits until he looks into her eyes again. “We’ll do this together. All of us.”

Rose fruitlessly glances around the room for the Doctor one last time before President Oouftangle takes to the podium and gives his speech. It’s broadcast across the city, mandatory viewing for everyone on tv sets in every building, on every streetcorner. He talks about the glory of Corporation, about sister-cities like Synergy who support the great work going on in this town. A bevy of factory workers are paraded out wearing the new berets. A dozen of them pile onto the stage along the President, grey uniforms sharply pressed and eyes downturned.

Denver reaches under the table to take Rose’s hand, his grip solid and strong. She glances sideways at him; he nods and takes a deep breath. This is it – whatever’s going to happen, it’s happening now.

Denver’s on his feet in a flash. He’s whistling, like a bloke summoning a cab on a busy London street, leaping from the floor onto the table in a single impressive jump. In response, the factory workers on the stage snap into motion. Rose realizes that their drugged docility was an act.

 “Welcome to the new world, Oouftangle! We won’t live like this anymore!” Denver cries.

 “Oouftangle, this stops now!”

The Doctor’s voice rings out with uncanny simultaneity, coordinated as if by design with Denver’s leap onto the table. Rose is on her feet, whirling around to follow the sound and finding the Doctor a few tables behind them, his spiky hair bobbing above the seated crowd. The sonic glows blue in his upraised right hand, buzzing at a frantic pitch.

“I won’t allow – hold on a minute!” The Doctor’s staring at Denver in bafflement, his inevitably heroic speech stopped short. “Hold on, what are you doing?”

Denver spares a glance backward. “Revolution, Doctor! Care to come along?”

“No wait, hold on!”

The factory workers onstage have converged around Oouftangle, seizing him and lifting him off of his eight feet. He wiggles in their grasp, flailing uselessly to find purchase and right himself.

“How dare you!” he roars. “Security!  _Security_!”

Denver shouts, “For months, the slaves in your factories have weaned themselves off of those chemicals you use to control us! We say, here and now, that it’s time for us to sit down and talk right here, right now, on planet-wide broadcast. We’re going to talk about a new way of life on this planet, a new way of life for  _all of us_!”

*****

This is terrible. This is the worst thing that could possibly happen.

This is the one contingency the Doctor didn’t prepare for, the one the Doctor didn’t see coming.

His reconnaissance revealed nothing of a local insurgency; he had no idea of its existence. He’d been going on the assumption he’d be working alone, that the masses were too opiated to free themselves without a drastic catalyst.

He’d designed the mind-control helmet to fool Oouftangle and his lot, then retrofitted it to alter brain-waves and counteract the despotic chemical control of the planetary slave-drivers.

Except at this moment it’s crystal clear that these workers, they aren’t drugged at all. The helmet wasn’t designed to work on a standard humanoid brain, it was designed to straighten out a scrambled chemical mess of a humanoid brain. To radically alter thought patterns, rearrange them and let the workers think clearly, for themselves, for the first time in their lives.

Except they’re already thinking clearly. And once the helmet switches on, the Doctor isn’t sure what effect it will have on a perfectly normal brain. The Doctor activated the automatic countdown on the helmets the minute the workers stepped onstage; there’s no stopping it remotely, he has to physically disconnect the mechanism from the wearers.

“No, no, nononononononono,” the Doctor cries, agitated to the point of near hysteria, trying to push his way through the crowd that’s on its feet now, thronging around the stage. Denver – someone he underestimated, overlooked – spares him a glance before leaping from his tabletop to the next, above the crowd, heading toward the stage as well. There’s a flash of blond hair behind him, Rose running and leaping to keep up, taking short strides in her tight skirt.

The Doctor is screaming, howling, desperate: “Take off the hats! All of you, take off the —!”

Before he can finish, the beret on each factory worker’s head activates. The dozen men and women go stiff for a split second before they twitch in eerie synchronicity. The woman holding one of Oouftangle’s legs lets out a feral-sounding howl and yanks hard at the appendage. Within seconds the rest of the group onstage is screaming, tearing, beyond reason, turned from humans into something animalistic and without higher thought.

Denver plunges forward, shouting and pleading for calm, leaping onto the stage in a bid to stop his compatriots before they turn violent.

It’s too late.

Oouftangle’s limbs disappear in a mass of screaming humanoid bodies, and Denver disappears along with him. Rose stands on the table nearest the stage, but she doesn’t leap. The Doctor can hear her shouting Denver’s name.

Blood, humanoid red and arachnid blue, runs in rivulets from the podium and onto the floor.

The regular crowd has turned from confused milling into panicked stampede, pushing and shoving to get to the exits before the workers finish onstage and look for more victims. The Doctor shouts for Rose, terrified that she might leap onstage. It’s too late – too late to save Denver and Oouftangle, too late to salvage the situation.

An elbow hits him in the solar plexus and he goes down, shoulder smashing into the floor, cheek and eye slamming into the concrete. Feet kick and stomp him in a blind need to get out of the room. His respiratory bypass activates automatically and he struggles to his hands and knees, trying to get up again, trying to get to Rose and the stage, trying to stop this nightmare.

*****

Rose can’t see Denver in the mass of mindless, enraged flesh on the stage, but she can see the blood.

Gauging her distance carefully, she takes a long leap onto the corner of the stage, landing just behind a pair of male factory workers. Before they can turn around, she reaches up and simultaneously snatches the beret off of their heads, tossing them away. The men whirl around, teeth bared. They pause, blink, frown in confusion.

One says, “What did …”

“Help me!” Rose pleads, pointing at the other workers who are just noticing them. “We have to take the caps off and save them. Help me!”

With that, she lunges for the nearest worker’s head, reaching for her beret. The woman grabs Rose’s arm, fingernails digging into her bicep, wild fury in her eyes. One of the men she’d just saved snatches the woman’s beret, and the woman’s grip goes slack as the cap’s control vanishes.

Four of them now, working against a dozen – except the Doctor suddenly appears by Rose’s side, whirling through the crowd with them. Within a matter of minutes they have finished – all the thought-control devices are on the floor, workers dazed but in their right minds.

There are two corpses in the middle of the stage, and a civilization in chaos outside the building.

The Doctor stands to the side, his hearts in his throat and his plans in ruins, and watches as Rose sobs over Denver’s body. His head buzzes, alternate timelines of ways this situation could have ended ( _should have ended_ ), but didn’t, spinning into oblivion.

He doesn’t realize he’s sunk down to sit on the floor, head in hands, until Rose comes to sit beside him and cries against his shoulder.

*****

In the end, Emmaline is the one who steps into the power gap. With the Doctor’s help, she acts as mediator in the discussion between the leaders of Corporation and the factory workers, she brings them together and helps them to find common ground.

It’s only been two days since the incident at the banquet, busy days with hardly enough time to eat or sleep, certainly not enough time to talk. The Doctor doesn’t seem to want to say much to Rose, anyway.

When they take the last trip down to the basement of the building to get into the TARDIS, Emmaline holds the Doctor’s hand and hugs him goodbye. She hugs Rose, too, and Rose returns the gesture with genuine affection and respect.

The TARDIS doors close, the Doctor tosses his brown coat onto the nearest coral strut, and he immediately fixates on the console, flipping buttons and switches.

“There’s a carnival on Praxis Minor with a ferris wheel so tall that it breaks through the upper atmosphere,” he says, bouncing on one heel and then the other, still not looking at Rose. “What do you say?”

“I need a shower,” Rose replies dully. “And I need to sleep for a week.”

She walks past him and down the corridor toward her room.

When she arrives, slow, measured steps that she counted out in her head taking her through the halls, it looks exactly like it always does. And that’s just as jarring as it always is, after trouble like this. 

A part of her expects things to have changed, for her world to look different, the way the world does for countless others now, and it doesn’t seem right, they way she and the Doctor just slip back into life. 

But they live in a vacuum, in a vortex, in a time ship, and whatever havoc the wreak, whatever help they can offer, it has no impact on her physical surroundings. 

It’s only inside her that things are different, and it’s so much to carry sometimes, ever-changing landscapes of emotion, guilt and relief, joy and sorrow — her body feels like it’s been turned inside out, and the only other person that could possibly see, could possibly understand, barely likes to stop for a plaster before he’s on to the next.

She can’t fault him, not really, he’s been doing this so much longer than she has, has scars she’s sure would blanket him completely if he let them show, but sometimes she just wants to…rest.

Take a breath.

Look back.

Grieve. 

Part of her is afraid though -- afraid if she lets it loose, she'll never pack it back in. 

And so she slips off her clothes and slips into the shower, refusing to acknowledge it if any of the moisture on her face has a distinctive salty tang. 

The rest of her routine is done on autopilot, putting her lotion on, putting her pajamas on, putting herself into bed. 

She has nightmares sometimes, after trips like these. But they're never about what she's seen. They're about the things she can't see -- the possibilities that they left too soon, that the ever-afters weren't so happy after all. 

For weeks after Mickey stayed behind in that other world, she dreamt of his grandma dying again, of the cybermen returning, of a man named Pete that's not her dad being run over by a car. 

Once she'd dreamt that Mickey was driving and she stayed up for a day and a half, finally collapsing in the jump seat and waking in her own bed, hazy memories of the Doctor carrying her dancing in the periphery. 

Tonight when she wakes, it's from a dream of a picnic with her mum. Rose was little, and it had rained. 

It's a memory, this dream, and she remembers the helplessness of it all. She'd looked forward to the picnic all week in school, through teasing about her ratty shoes, through a failed maths test, through beans on toast and soggy Weetabix, and when Saturday had arrived and their lunch unpacked onto a blanket her Gran had knitted before Rose was even born, the sky had opened up, and it was over before it began. 

It was an injustice, a powerlessness, that kept Rose in a terrible mood the rest of the weekend, and she'd taken it out on her poor mum. 

Her mum, who could no more control the weather than she could the whims of reckless drivers, and who had tried so hard. 

And now, in the TARDIS, she feels the same guilt she'd felt in the wake of that weekend. 

She pushes herself out of bed, walking silently to the loo. She washes her face and brushes her teeth and, though she's done sleeping for the night, she leaves her pajamas on. 

Finding the Doctor is easy. He's in the console room, the first place she'd checked, and when she sees him, she feels the dam break. 

Her face crumples as soon as she meets his eye, a soundless cry loosening from behind her ribs.

He gathers her into a hug immediately, letting her sob into the jacket of his suit, rubbing a comforting hand across her back. 

"I know," he says. "I know."

Hours later, she calls her mum and apologizes for a picnic they'd had lightyears ago, and her mum laughs, and tells her she's forgiven. 

*****

It's been a month since they'd left Corporation. 

Rose has lost and found her face, he has lost and found the TARDIS. 

Same old trouble, same old life. 

They're in America, accidentally-on-purpose, and he's promised to buy her breakfast in place of the Fourth of July fireworks they'd missed by half a dozen months. 

It's a cloudy day anyway, rain collecting on the windows of the diner as they wait for a waitress to take their order. 

When she arrives, Rose orders an omelette with ham and peppers, a Denver omelette, and the Doctor lets himself try. 

"I called him that, you know," he tells Rose once the waitress leaves. 

"What?"

"Denver," he says, and waits a moment to gauge her reaction to the mention. She looks curious, and sad, but it's an accepting kind of sad, and he continues. 

"I told Emmaline, she asked if I was looking for you, and I said I was, or 'that omelette bloke.' She hadn't understood."

Rose smiles. "I wouldn't have either. Didn't know it was called that until just now."

"Wasn't my best, as my insults for your boyfriends go."

Rose rolls her eyes in a friendly sort of way. "Yeah, it's no 'Rickey the Idiot,' is it?"

He can't help the sheepish expression that crosses his face — she's got him pegged. 

"I mentioned him, too. Said somewhere he was probably pleased that he didn’t have the most ridiculous nickname anymore.”

She laughs in response, but the sound is almost brittle, and she doesn’t say anything else.

“He is, though, Rose. He’s probably pleased and happy and living a life he chose, instead of one that was picked for him. Just like you are.”

Rose nods, but still doesn’t speak, eyes darting to track the rain as it streams down the glass.

“Are you ever mad I didn’t stop him? Make him stay?”

The question makes Rose’s head snap back, her eyes meeting his, wide and confused. They’re already into territory they usually don’t tread, mentions of past adventures, past trouble, and she seems to be struggling for footing. 

“I think I’d have been mad if you did, eventually,” she says. “Like you said, he picked that life. It wouldn’t have been fair of me to keep him where he didn’t want to be, when I got to be where I wanted.”

“And where’s that?”

She furrows her brow, clearly still uncertain why they’re talking about this at all — _what_ they’re talking about. 

“On the TARDIS,” she says. “With you.”

“And are you mad I didn’t stop you? Made you come?”

She exhales a breath, and from the sound of it, it’s clear he’s made some great blunder of arrogance.

“You didn’t make me come, and you don’t make me stay,” she says. “I did it because I wanted to, and I stay because I want to.”

The waitress returns with their drinks, orange juice for him, a Coke for Rose. She hasn’t touched a cup of coffee since they left Corporation. 

“That’s good, you know,” he says. “That you do what you want.”

She rips open the paper surrounding the straw, freeing it and dunking it into her drink. She bobs it up and down a few times in the liquid with the tip of her finger.

“Why? Don’t you?” she says.

“Not always. Not when it leave things — people — worse than I found them.”

Her eyes dart up to meet his. There are a lot of things — people — he could be talking about, but it’s her this time, and he’s not sure if she knows. It’s getting harder and harder to pretend that he’s prepared to fight this forever, that he’ll continue to travel with Rose and always be content to keep things like they are between them. 

Every near miss, every close call, every time they lose someone, it’s a reminder he’s going to lose her, too, and if he keeps on like this, the pain of that will be blown wide with regret.

“Guess that happens anyway though, sometimes,” he says. 

“Yeah,” she says, fiddling with her fork where it lies on a paper napkin, and he thinks that’s all he’s going to get. Then she lets out a breath, looking at him once more. 

“Maybe you should give it a try — doing what you want. Maybe things are always going to end how they’re going to end, and it’s up to us to enjoy them while we can.”

Ah, she knew — knew what he was talking about. It makes him want to backpedal, to pretend _he_ doesn’t know. 

He purposely lightens his tone. “Did you enjoy your time Denver, then? In between all the drugs and bowling?” 

She exhales a laugh. “Yeah, I think I did. Might’ve convinced you to let me pick up another stray, if things had gone different.”

Pinpricks scatter across the back of his neck and he rubs at them. He hadn’t been expecting that. “Really?”

“No,” she grins. “You should see your face though.”

That night, he joins her in the media room, settling close to her on the sofa as he passes her a bowl of crisps.

“Don’t you have repairs to do?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But I _wanted_ to do this.”

*****

Things are different, Rose can tell. 

It’s like the Doctor’s working up to something, circling it, coming closer and closer on each pass, only to skitter away each time. 

They’ve had a few less dramatic trips, despots and invasions and trouble with easy solution, but every time something goes wrong, every time an outcome is even slightly different than they expected, he’s at her side, comforting her. 

Still not with words, not like she thought she wanted, but with his presence. Wrapping an arm around her shoulder, pressing a kiss to the top of her head, all the gestures that seem to fit with their standard procedure, except for the times they’re delivered, they’re times she would have been left alone before. 

Today though, there hasn’t been any trouble at all. Taking in the sights on a planet she couldn’t pronounce, the Doctor’s found them another bowling alley, only here the pins are set in a square, not a triangle. 

It’s much harder this way, the science or geometry of it so different from what she’s used to, that she’s down nearly 40 pins by the time they’re in the last few frames. The Doctor winks at her as returns from bowling another strike, hooking the ball into a corner of the pins and taking them all down. 

“Where was this bloke on Corporation?” she asks, standing to get her ball from the return as he slips into her vacated seat in front of the scoring machine. “Emmaline practically carried you lot, she could’ve used the help.”

“That bloke,” he says, lingering hard on the final consonant, “was distracted.”

Rose laughs, and walks forward to pitch her ball down the alley, groaning when she only manages to take down a handful of pins. 

“So not only did she have to bowl to support your sorry arse, but you also were staring at her breasts? _Time Lords_ ,” she says when she returns, rolling her eyes in mock disgust. 

He drops his feet from where he’d propped them up on the scoring machine. “What?” 

“Her breasts,” Rose says, gesturing back and forth between her own briefly before realizing that his eyes have followed her movement. “The _distraction_.”

He laughs, eyes finally pulling away from her chest — she’s not, that wasn’t, she didn’t imagine that, did she?

“Emmaline wasn’t the distraction,” he says, as if it should’ve been obvious. “ _You_ were. Honestly, Rose, I know there was a lot in play there, but did you have to look so _cozy_ with him?”

Suddenly he snaps his mouth shut, as if realizing what he’s said. She’s not sure if he’s sorry for the mention of Denver or the implication the Doctor was jealous though, and she wants to be. 

“Why, Doctor? Jealous?” She grins at him to keep from scaring him off, which is why his answer takes her by surprise. 

“Yes.”

The noise of the bowling alley fades for a moment, the sound of pins knocking down, people cheering, it all dissipates as she takes in his expression. It’s…open, and she has no idea what to do with that.

“Jealous of his hair, I’d say. Such a nice color and so thick —”

Next to her, her bowling ball rolls out from the return, coming to a stop near her fingertips, but she barely notices. 

“First,” he says, rising to stand in front of her, “his hair was not that great, teeny tiny little split ends all over the place. All those chemicals blanketing that city and he couldn’t have found himself some conditioner?”

Rose laughs, reaching for her ball, but the Doctor gets there first, picking it up and making no move to hand it over.

“Second,” he continues, “I was jealous because he was at your side. What did he call himself that night? Your plus one?”

“Yeah, but as mates, I know what it was supposed to look like, but it was just mates, Doctor. Just like me and you.”

Whatever had been building in him, in his eyes, immediately dims, and he hands her the ball with a flat, “Right.”

There’s an obvious answer here, but they’ve never been good at the obvious answer. Corporation itself was an example of that. But it just seems so much like…so much like he was circling again, like he might have gone farther this time, and she wants to see.

Dropping the ball back into the return with a thunk, she turns to give him her full attention. 

“Do you think we’re _more_ than mates?” she asks, fighting the urge to put her hands on her hips.

He shrugs one shoulder.

“Do you _want_ to be more than mates?”

He shrugs again. 

“Do you _want_ to be having this conversation?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

The hurt sizzles through her like lightning and in a flash, she sweeps up her ball again, hurtling it down the alley without any finesse. It knocks the remainder of the pins down in a way she hadn’t been able to accomplish in an entire game of trying her best and she growls angrily, stomping back to the scoring machine. 

“Feel better?” he asks, eyebrows raised.

“No,” she snaps back. “God, what is _with_ you lately? Hot and cold like a bloody faucet.”

He hasn’t sat back down, so now they’re just standing in front of each other, Rose simmering with anger and a bruised ego and the Doctor — oh, he’s _smirking_ , she’s gonna slap him, that’s it, she’s gonna slap —

“I don’t _want_ to have that conversation because I _want_ to do something about it instead,” he says, and then in a quieter voice, a more uncertain voice, he adds, “if you want.”

Her heart stumbles in her chest, tripping over its feet before picking up like a jackhammer. “Do it then.”

Taking a breath and ruffling the hair on top of his head, he nods. “Right.”

Then he takes a small step toward her, one hand reaching to cup her cheek as the other wraps around her upper arm. 

“This,” he licks his lips, eyes dropping to her mouth. “This is what I’m gonna do,” he says, pausing to make his intentions clear.

“Do it,” she repeats, tipping her face closer.

“Gonna,” he says, but the word is barely more than a breath against her lips as he presses his mouth to hers.

It — _she_ — probably should’ve been chaste, tentative, hesitant, should have let him set the pace, but instead her mouth opens against his immediately, the taste of rubbish bowling alley beer mixing with the taste of him, as he pulls her closer, kisses her deeper.

Her arms fasten themselves around his neck, forearms pressing down on his shoulders to anchor him to her, as he slips his hand from her arm to wrap around her waist. 

She couldn’t say that it was her tongue that moved first, or that it was his, only that suddenly both tongues are there, slipping between back and forth between their mouths in a wet, artless tangle.  

His feels cooler than hers, like her mouth after a glass of ice water, and she laps at the feeling, hands turning to let her fingers twine in his hair as he moves the hand on her face back to mirror her actions. 

It’s so much information, her brain can hardly process it all, the pressure of his chest solid against her own, the feel of his teeth as his mouth pulls back to nip at her bottom lip, the soft, encouraging sound he makes in the back of his throat, it’s all tumbling together, blurring, twining, melting, until it feels like her skin is dancing in light, her blood rushing in her ears like ocean waves.

And his tongue, his tongue, his tongue.

A loud cheer erupts from a few lanes down and they spring apart, pivoting in tandem to see, but no one’s looking at them, instead celebrating a strike with high fives and loud whoops. 

When they turn back to each other, the Doctor is grinning, a wide, happy, disbelieving grin that he indulges with a little laugh.

“And what do you _want_ to do now, Rose Tyler?”

“Back to the TARDIS?” she asks, biting her lip to keep the hope from her eyes. 

“Oh, yes.”

*****

He should’ve lost his nerve by now, should’ve lost it and found it at least a dozen times, but it’s stayed constant. The walk to the TARDIS, the walk to her room, and now, standing in front of her door, he can’t help but feel resolved. 

This is what he wants, this is what she wants, and this is what they’ll do. 

“Ready?” he asks, hand slipping from her grip to rest on the doorknob.

“Ready.”

With a flourish, he opens the door, gallantly bowing down to gesture her in first, and she laughs and rolls her eyes before preceding him in. 

She stops at the foot of the bed, waiting for him to join her, and when he does, she rocks up on tiptoes, pressing a kiss to his lips that’s sweeter, and more innocent, than any they’d shared so far. 

He follows her mouth with his own when she pulls away, arms wrapping around her waist as she wraps hers around his shoulders, and they kiss again. It’s hot and messy and wonderful again in a matter of seconds, Rose’s teeth at his bottom lip briefly before she angles her head, slipping her tongue against his, kissing him deeply before letting him take control. 

With his hands on her hips, he turns them until her back is to the bed, fingers curling into the cotton of her jumper as he urges her to sit down. She follows his cue, seating herself and pulling off her shoes — her _bowling_ shoes, they’d left without their _shoes_ , of all things — and she laughs softly as she scoots herself up the bed. 

He toes off his own shoes and follows after her, propping himself up over her where she lies on top of a tangle of sheets and pillows. He leans down to brush his nose against her own, pressing a quick kiss to her mouth as he settles his weight more firmly between her legs. 

He’s half-hard, a lazy sort of arousal that rockets up when she arches her hips into his, tipping her head back in a way that leaves her neck stretched, begging for him to put his mouth to it. 

First softly, and then harder, he drops wet kisses along the column of her throat, a little bit of teeth and a little bit of suction as he goes, mouth trailing the join of her neck and shoulder where he presses his hardest kiss yet, working the skin in a way that makes her rut her hips, legs jerking to wrap around his waist. 

It’s brilliant, the sounds she’s making, the feel of her, and he does it again, in the same spot, making her pant and writhe beneath him until she grabs his head and pulls him away, bring his mouth to hers once more. 

Her hands move again, pushing at his shoulders until he makes space between their chests, then she’s unknotting his tie, their mouths disconnecting and reconnecting gracelessly as she slips it from his collar and moves on to the buttons of his shirt. 

He pulls back to remove it and his undershirt when she’s finished, and she uses the time to strip off her jumper, his hands stalling on the button of his trousers when he catches sight of her in her bra.

Then he’s leaning forward to kiss her again, fingers dancing up her side, scratching across her ribs, before cupping one of her breasts in his hand. He rests his weight on his opposite arm, propped up on his forearm as he tests the weight of her breast, massaging it softly and then harder as she pushes her chest into his hand. 

Slipping his hand beneath her, he unclasps the garment, easing up only enough to give her space to remove it before he’s back again, with his mouth this time, sucking lightly at her nipple, groaning against her skin at the feel of her fingers scratching through his hair. Shifting his weight to other side, he gives the same treatment to her opposite breast, nipping and licking and sucking while his fingers knead against the soft flesh.

Her legs are moving restlessly, wrapping around his hips again and anchoring their bodies together, so she can arch into him from below. It’s too much, these terrible barriers their trousers have become, and he springs back with a groan, jumping to his feet at the side of the bed and working to unbutton his trousers. 

On the bed, Rose’s fingers do the same, unzipping her jeans, peeling them down in her hips in a flail of limbs. She looks at him then, standing dumbly at the side of the bed with his trousers around his ankles, and she reaches out a hand to snag a finger in the waist of his boxer briefs.

“These, too,” she says, her palm ghosting over his erection when she pulls back once more.

He nods at her own knickers expectantly. “Turnabout.”

“Of course.”

He tugs his pants down, stepping out of them and his trousers in one go, before bending to tug off his socks. When he turns back to Rose, her knickers and socks are gone, as promised, and this is it, this is Rose Tyler, naked on a bed. 

It’s — 

It’s — 

It’s — he loses the thought on a sigh, shifting to kneel on the bed once more before leaning down to kiss her. The feel of her skin against his, smooth and soft against the hair and angles of him, is another thing he can’t find a word for, instead pulling his mouth from hers to kiss down her throat, across her breasts, her stomach, until he’s between her legs. His hands loosely hold her thighs apart as he presses a kiss to the short thatch of hair covering her before moving lower, dragging his tongue, wet and slow against her.

Rose’s hands fist in the sheets, her entire body tensing as she lets out a long, low groan, and he laps at her again, firmer this time, tongue dipping into her briefly before circling around her clit. 

She’s making sounds above him, needy, encouraging, _loud_ sounds, and he has to watch her, draws his eyes up her body until he can see the way her face contorts every time his tongue taps her clit, every time he dips inside of her, and when she catches him watching, she laughs unsteadily. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” she breathes with a grin, “That’s good, it’s good,” and she flexes her hips, urging him to continue. He does as suggested, bringing his hand up to slip two fingers into her as he sets his tongue into a steady pulse against her clit. 

It could be embarrassing, the zeal he’s working her with, fingers and tongue and mouth, it’s clear he’s enjoying it, he’d always expected to, of course, thoughts of doing this to Rose a regular occurrence alone in his bed, but this — it’s remarkable, she’s so wet, and so hot, and she sounds so sexy, he keeps pressing his cock into the mattress just to relieve some of the pressure. 

She falls into his rhythm, hips arching in time to the strokes of his fingers, the tap of his tongue, and the noises become words, pleas — dare he say it — _begging_ , “Yes, fuck, god, right there, fuck, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,” and she comes on a long, loud moan, shuddering against him as he tapers her through it. 

Wiping his wet mouth against her inner thigh with a hard kiss, he shifts himself back up over her, hissing out a breath when her hands wraps around his cock as soon as it’s in reach. 

She strokes it a few times, and then keeps her fingers around him, letting him fuck her fist in the shallow rhythm she’d set up, but as hot as her hand is, as good as it feels, it’s not where he wants to be, and he moves her hand with his own to position himself at her entrance. 

There’s a moment just before, where she’s staring up at him and he’s looking down at her, and it stretches on a breath until he pushes in, the hitch of his hips bringing his cock forward, bringing him inside of her, and they exhale twin groans. 

He stays there, buried in her, for a moment, Rose’s arms slipping underneath his to curl against his back, fingers pressing into the skin to urge him on, and then he pulls back only to slip inside her once more. 

It’s slow at first, the hot, wet feeling of thrusting into her almost overwhelming, and he has to concentrate on kissing her for several long moments before he can continue. 

Her hands trace patterns on his back, her hips arching to match his slow strokes, seemingly content until the moment his mouth presses against the spot on her neck, and she sparks, hands plunging lower to grab his arse, bringing him forward into her much quicker than before.

He’s not going to argue, _couldn’t_ argue, and his hips begin to piston against hers faster and faster.

“Ohhhh, fuck, fuck, Rose, that feels good, you feel so good,” he’s babbling, panting, Rose keening erratically underneath him, each of them ratcheting higher and higher and higher until she comes with a shout that breaks apart in the middle, mouth working soundlessly against his shoulder as she rides it out. 

He pumps faster, harder, so close, so fucking close, and she’s encouraging him as she shudders through aftershocks, “Yes, yes, yes, that’s it, that’s it, fuck, god, yeah, your cock,” it’s nearly incoherent and it’s the last word that breaks him, plunging into her a final time as he spills himself inside of her. 

She tightens around him, guiding him through it, as he presses damp, sloppy kisses to her throat before propping himself up to look at her once more.

There’s the light sound of disbelieving laughter from both of them, matching goofy grins as he drops his forehead to rest against hers. 

“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” he tells her when he pulls back, and his voice seems so quiet now, compared to a minute before. 

“Me, too,” she agrees with another laugh. 

“And what do you _want_ now?” he asks.

“An omelette,” she says. “No, wait. Chips. I want chips.”


End file.
